Desktop app universal quick add / capture

Some desktop apps like things 3, todoist, and others have a quick add feature where issuing a keyboard command will call the app forward and allow a new item to be entered.

I would love to see a feature like this in super notes, being able to quickly capture a thought after a great idea or being interrupted can help maintain flow and ensure everything that need to be captured can be quickly.

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Iā€™ve added this to the roadmap! Once we have got our desktop apps out we will look into adding this :tada:

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Related to this, for Macs, I would love to have a menu bar app: when you click on it, it opens a box for you to type in a note, which is saved automatically (or manually) to an inbox (not the sharing one) in Supernotes. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could allow the menu bar app icon to be a receptacle as well, so that you could drag text and images to it, and it would automatically send them to the inbox.

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@wlwashburn Some great ideas, thanks for sharing them. We will see what we can do! :blush:

This would be a killer feature for me. I often need to take a quick note at work, but I get distracted if I have to change windows so I use paper for that. Iā€™ve also tried using various note-taking apps for Dungeons and Dragons, but having to change tabs took me out of the game too much.

Edit: I really like the way that Timeular do their QuickTrack feature if youā€™re looking for a good example of this. You create and dismiss the popup with the same button which is better than the way it works in Todoists IMO.

Thanks for the input @Bjornsides, some good additions.

Can I ask, when youā€™re playing D&D, what window youā€™re switching from? One of our original goals with Supernotes was that (on desktop) it would be a great sidekick for whatever other windows you have open on your computer, because the notecard format lends itself to this pretty well. You just condense your SN window down to say 1/3 of your screen and it is responsive so will switch to the mobile layout, where you can then ergonomically take / reference notes alongside whatever youā€™ve left to take up the remaining 2/3 of your screen.

But if this isnā€™t an option for you it would be very helpful to know why!

More long term, we actually have plans to do this but 10x, where the SN window is actually integrated directly with other software.

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Hi Connor,

When Iā€™m playing D&D I tend to have a few windows open. These are the main ones I tend to keep open:

  • Fantasy Grounds (the online tabletop we use) on one screen
  • A browser open with my online character sheet taking up half of the other screen. This may also have tabs open whatsapp or searching for rules online.
  • Zoom in the other half of the screen where I have the browser open (so I can see the other players)
  • I may also have a PDF viewer open to view the rule book

I want to be able to take notes without having to move my mouse regardless of what window is currently focused. I could use ALT-Tab to change focus, but itā€™s a bit clumsy, and Iā€™d rather not cycle through windows to get to the right one.

Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Chris

+1 for the universal quick add, that would be amazing
+1 for the menu bar icon to use for quick add - would also be amazing

:slight_smile:

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Any idea when a good quick capture solution will be available?

Once weā€™ve released mobile apps out of early access in the next few months, we will start to dedicate our time to a good quick capture solution for our Desktop Apps and a Supernotes Web Extension.

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Hi :wave:t2: Are there plans to include this one in 3.0 release?

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Hi @marcmlyn, welcome to the Supernotes Community :wave:

Weā€™ve actually de-prioritised this, since the release of our Raycast Extension ā€“ granted this is only for Mac users at the moment. However once weā€™ve got Supernotes 3 out, we will re-evaluate this :slight_smile:

I would absolutely love a universal command bar like pop-up (like Cmd+K but outside of the app), to do quick search, lookup, capture, etc. I know the Raycast extension exists and use it (though not finding myself using it too much), but itā€™s limited by virtue of being a different application with limited ā€œoutsiderā€ UI.

It doesnā€™t allow linking, tagging, styling, etc. Some built into SN itself would be a lot more powerful, so hopefully this is re-considered! :pray:

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Hi! I was thinking that it would be a very useful thing, at least for me, to have the ability to select text wherever I am (browser, app on macOsā€¦) and by right-clicking I can send the selected part to Supernotes, creating a new card. I hope it can be implemented soon!

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Would be useful for Windows/Linux as well

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Hi @antonello23,

I moved your topic to an existing one on a desktop universal quick add. Ironically the challenge is exactly what you just mentioned @SalmanMKC. We would want feature parity across all platforms, and this would take a quite a bit of effort.

In the meantime, building you own solution tailored to your use case with our API or using the community created Web Clipper would be a good stopgap.

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I did some research today because I saw itā€˜s possible to add a custom plugin to flow launcher. Itā€˜s the windows alternative of raycast I guess. I will test it in the next days and if it works Iā€˜m open to share it with the community :slight_smile:

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+1 Using Raycast for this task, but missing the comfort and look of the Supernotes editor

Hey team

I was recently invited to test Lazy, which is another app. I signed up for a month and tested it. I decided to stay with Supernotes because I honestly think this app is way better, but one thing that I really liked about their product is their global quick capture.

In essence, you can select anything, anywhere, and it captures as a jot that you can reference and organize.

By any change, do we have any similar feature planned for this? To avoid me having to switch tabs when creating a new card on Supernotes?

Hi Daniel, thanks for the feature request. Iā€™ve moved it to an existing thread.

Weā€™ve been working on improving our Raycast extension precisely for this reason, and with Windows support on the way as well we think that will be fantastic. We just updated it so you can clip anything youā€™ve selected / in your clipboard and immediately send it to Supernotes.